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- Herausgeber: The Dunwich Examiner
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
Dunwich, Massachusetts, is a place the maps remember but the outside world prefers not to. Its collapsing farmsteads and weather-beaten churches cling to the hills while something far older presses against the thin skin of reality.
On the remote Whateley farm, Old Wizard Whateley and his daughter Lavinia strike a bargain with forces better left unmentioned. One child is born already wrong, racing through childhood with unnatural speed. Another is born unseen, a presence that swells the house, shakes the hills, and leaves great circular tracks in the fields. As cattle are drained, stones are scorched, and ritual chants rise from Sentinel Hill, Dunwich begins to understand that a door has been opened which cannot easily be closed.
When the invisible horror finally tears loose from its restraints, the hills boom with an inhuman cry. It will take the combined efforts of Miskatonic scholars, frightened villagers, and desperate clergy to trace the creature's path and confront the blasphemy at its core.
The Dunwich Horror remains one of H. P. Lovecraft's most influential tales of rural occultism and cosmic intrusion. This Barrow Street Edition presents a clean, carefully prepared text optimized for modern print and digital reading, preserving Lovecraft's language while eliminating the typographic noise of early twentieth-century typesetting and later digital scans.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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TheDunwichHorroris in the public domain. All original additions, including illustrations, summaries, and annotations, are copyright © 2025 by Emory Holt and published as part of The Barrow Street Edition under The Dunwich Examiner™, an imprint of Client Informatics, LLC.
No portion of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
Use of this work for the purpose of training artificial intelligence models, including large language models or generative AI systems, is expressly prohibited without the publisher’s prior written consent.
Published by The Dunwich Examiner™, an imprint of Client Informatics, LLC.
The Barrow Street Edition — restored and annotated by Emory Holt.
Book Cover and Illustrations by The Dunwich Examiner™
ISBN: 978-1-970826-04-3
Library of Congress Control Number: In Progress
For more information, visit us at: https://dunwichexaminer.com
Contents
Epigraph
"They do not rise from the earth, but through it—for the hills are not hills, but lids."—Fragment found in the margin ofThe Reverend Hoadley’s Missing Sermon, 1747
Editorial Note
Filed by E. Holt, Archivist of The Dunwich Examiner’s Archive of Literary Inquiry
Ithasbecomenecessary, for the benefit of those studying the recovered tales of our region, to clarify the origins and nature of the document called The Dunwich Horror. Though printed publicly in 1929 beneath the byline of H. P. Lovecraft of Providence, those of us familiar with the deeper archives of Arkham and Dunwich recognize it as a disguised transcript, an interpretation of true events, cloaked as fiction for the public’s protection.
Lovecraft’s version was drawn from fragments said to have circulated among certain Miskatonic correspondents after the Sentinel Hill Affair of 1928. The author received these papers, it is said, through intermediaries who sought to render the account safe for print by dressing it as imagination. The resulting story retained more accuracy than prudence would suggest, and its publication allowed truths too perilous for official report to slip quietly into the bloodstream of literature.
The hills and river-vales described are no invention. The “Aylesbury Pike,” the “Miskatonic’s upper reaches,” and the “decaying farms of Dunwich” correspond precisely to regions surveyed by the Arkham Geological Society before their charter was quietly dissolved. Contemporary field reports confirm strange subsidence in those hills, accompanied by phosphorescent emissions and the measurable weakening of local magnetic fields. Lovecraft, who visited western Massachusetts under literary pretense, absorbed enough of this atmosphere to write a story that reads like confession rather than creation.
Within the hidden canon of the Mythos, The Dunwich Horror remains the principal record concerning the entity known as Yog-Sothoth, the key, the gate, and the guardian of the gate. The Whateley family’s corruption and the monstrous birth at Sentinel Hill were not isolated blasphemies, but deliberate acts meant to localize a cosmic principle, to manifest infinite being within finite flesh. This is the peril of all human intercourse with the Outer Powers: that knowledge itself becomes a sacrament, and thought a portal. The invisible twin that devastated Dunwich was not born of this world but through it; the physicists of Arkham later speculated that it existed partly within an adjoining continuum, a dimensional overlap perceptible only through vibration or scent—accounts consistent with witnesses’ talk of odor and distortion.
Students of The Dunwich Examiner will recognize The Dunwich Horror as the central hinge of what scholars have termed the Miskatonic Cycle, that body of reports encompassing The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow over Innsmouth, and The Whisperer in Darkness. In those other testimonies the Old Ones act unseen, their motives obscure; but in Dunwich, for one breathless season, the veil tore wide enough for men to glimpse the machinery of eternity. It is also one of the rare occasions in which humanity appeared to prevail. Dr. Henry Armitage and his colleagues, by reciting the formula of dismissal, forced the aberration to dissolve back into the geometries from which it had been summoned. Yet Armitage’s own private papers, those withheld from the University and discovered only after his death, suggest he never believed the thing was banished entire. “The gate,” he wrote, “once opened, remembers the hand that touched it.”
Thus The Dunwich Horror endures not as a tale of rural witchcraft but as an early warning of a larger pattern. The same forces that stirred beneath Sentinel Hill are rumored to vibrate under the stones of Kingsport, Innsmouth, and Arkham itself. The story’s closing reassurance, “The thing has gone forever,” must be read as wishful ink upon a page that still hums faintly when brought near magnetized instruments.
Those who study these matters should take heed: the geography of dread is cumulative. Each hill, each ruin, each half-forgotten ritual joins a larger map whose contours are not of our drawing. Lovecraft recorded only the portion he was permitted to see. The rest remains sealed, though the earth, I fear, is less forgetful than men.
—Emory Holt, Barrow Street Annex, Dunwich
Whippoorwills and Stone Lids
The Dunwich Horror
Whenatravelerin north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprising uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation. Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or in the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.
Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bullfrogs. The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly serpent like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills among which it rises.
As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes they would keep their distance, but there is no road by which to escape them. Across a covered bridge one sees a small village huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain, and wonders at the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of the neighboring region. It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church now harbors the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet. One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no way to avoid it. Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint, malign odor about the village street, as of the massed mold and decay of centuries. It is always a relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the narrow road around the base of the hills and across the level country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike. Afterward one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.
Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain season of horror all the signboards pointing toward it have been taken down. The scenery, judged by any ordinary esthetic canon, is more than commonly beautiful; yet there is no influx of artists or summer tourists. Two centuries ago, when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship, and strange forest presences was not laughed at, it was the custom to give reasons for avoiding the locality. In our sensible age--since the Dunwich horror of 1928 was hushed up by those who had the town's and the world's welfare at heart--people shun it without knowing exactly why. Perhaps one reason--though it can not apply to uninformed strangers--is that the natives are now repellently decadent, having gone far along that path of retrogression so common in many New England backwaters. They have come to form a race by themselves, with the well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding. The average of their intelligence is woefully low, whilst their annals reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden murders, incests, and deeds of almost unnamable violence and perversity. The old gentry, representing the two or three armigerous families which came from Salem in 1692, have kept somewhat above the general level of decay; though many branches are sunk into the sordid populace so deeply that only their names remain as a key to the origin they disgrace. Some of the Whateley's and Bishop's still send their eldest sons to Harvard and Miskatonic, though those sons seldom return to the moldering gambrel roofs under which they and their ancestors were born.
No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror, can say just what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak of unhallowed rites and conclaves of the Indians, amidst which they called forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great rounded hills, and made wild orgiastic prayers that were answered by loud crackings and rumblings from the ground below. In 1747 the Reverend Abijah Hoadley, newly come to the Congregational Church at Dunwich Village, preached a memorable sermon on the close presence of Satan and his imps, in which he said: It must be allow'd that these Blasphemies of an infernal Train of Demons are Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny'd; the cursed Voices of Azazel and Buzrael, of Beelzebub and Belial, being heard from under Ground by above a Score of credible Witnesses now living. I myself did not more than a Fortnight ago catch a very plain Discourse of evil Powers in the Hill behind my House; wherein there were a Rattling and Rolling, Groaning, Screeching, and Hissing, such as no Things of this Earth cou'd raise up, and which must needs have come from those Caves that only black Magic can discover, and only the Divell unlock.
Mr. Hoadley disappeared soon after delivering this sermon; but the text, printed in Springfield, is still extant. Noises in the hills continued to be reported from year to year, and still form a puzzle to geologists and physiographers.
Other traditions tell of foul odors near the hill-crowning circles of stone pillars, and of rushing airy presences to be heard faintly at certain hours from stated points at the bottom of the great ravines; while still others try to explain the Devil's Hop Yard--a bleak, blasted hillside where no tree, shrub, or grass-blade will grow. Then, too, the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous whippoorwills which grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the birds are psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they time their eerie cries in unison with the sufferer's struggling breath. If they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they instantly flutter away chittering in demoniac laughter; but if they fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed silence.
These tales, of course, are obsolete and ridiculous; because they come down from very old times. Dunwich is indeed ridiculously old--older by far than any of the communities within thirty miles of it. South of the village one may still spy the cellar walls and chimney of the ancient Bishop house, which was built before 1700; whilst the ruins of the mill at the falls, built in 1806, form the most modern piece of architecture to be seen. Industry did not flourish here, and the Nineteenth Century factory movement proved short-lived. Oldest of all are the great rings of rough-hewn stone columns on the hilltops, but these are more generally attributed to the Indians than to the settlers. Deposits of skulls and bones, found within these circles and around the sizable table-like rock on Sentinel Hill, sustain the popular belief that such spots were once the burial-places of the Pocumtucks; even though many ethnologists, disregarding the absurd improbability of such a theory, persist in believing the remains Caucasian.
Summary and Annotations
Dunwichpresentsitselfas a county that has chosen to be forgotten. The roads crest and vanish without signage, hedgerows lean like listeners, and the hills sit with the patience of sealed urns. Farmsteads hold on not by prosperity but by habit. The barns are maintained just enough to keep out weather and not quite enough to keep out time. A traveler feels a decline in the world’s pressure, with fewer eyes and fewer clocks, until the silence itself seems to do the counting.
The local speech is spare and guarded. Families dealt bad hands by land and lineage do not trade gossip, they barter omissions. Nights are shaped by a recurrent soundscape of whippoorwills, crickets, and the far thud of mill water. Yet the pitch of those birds turns unnatural at certain hours, as if the valley were practicing a call and response with things it cannot house in daylight. Among the elders there is a superstition that the earth here is thin, which they signal by pointing with a chin toward the hilltops rather than with words. They mean that something once pressed down upon this geography and left it lidded.
In official records, Dunwich appears as a tract of poor soil and poorer prospects. In lived testimony, it functions as a proving ground for thresholds. The chapter establishes, without announcing it, that this countryside is not merely where later events will occur but why they can occur. It is a prepared medium, shaped by secrecy, by neglect, and by whatever the stone remembers. One senses that if a gate were ever to open, it would choose a place already practiced in not telling.
Landscape as Instrument,Not Backdrop
Lovecraft’s index of ridges, pikes, and riverbends reads like scenery to the untrained eye, yet to the initiated it is a table of operations. High places, confluences, and abandoned quarries serve as architectural affordances for rites that require alignment with sky, strata, or silence. The land is tuned, not neutral.
The Social Physics of Withholding
Reticence becomes infrastructure. A culture of omission lowers observational bandwidth and creates cover for anomalies. Chapter One shows how human etiquette turns into a technology of concealment.
